Does Re-Driving Arrays Make them Greener?

by Administrator on August 4, 2007

Several vendors, including EMC and Network Appliance, have recently argued that redriving arrays with higher capacity drives is greener because you get more space for the same electrical costs. Am I buying this?

Nope.

Going to bigger drives, it seems to me, simply means that you are going to push additional demands out onto your shadow infrastructure — which is to say, data protection infrastructure. RAID 5 won’t work anymore because rebuilding big drive sets takes way too long. So, we are looking at some exotic non-standard RAIDing methods that bind us to a particular vendor’s gear (with all of the cost inefficiencies associated with lock-ins) or we go to standard RAID methods like mirroring, which requires doubling up on the number of drives we deploy (hence, more power load, not less).